Hogmanay and the Redding of the House

Scotland does New Year better than anywhere, and the reason is that for three hundred years it was not allowed to do Christmas. That is not a joke and it is not an exaggeration. It is the single most important fact about the Scottish ritual year and it explains almost everything about how Hogmanay looks.

The ban

After the Reformation the Kirk moved hard against Yule as a Catholic and superstitious observance. In 1640 the Scottish Parliament passed an act abolishing the Yule vacation, and Christmas was suppressed as a religious and public festival. It did not come back for a very long time. Christmas Day did not become a public holiday in Scotland until 1958. Boxing Day followed in 1974.

Within living memory, Scots worked on Christmas Day. My grandmother's generation treated it as a working Thursday with a slightly better dinner.

So the midwinter celebration went somewhere else. It went to the turn of the year, which had no theological objection attached to it, and it took all the feasting, gift-giving, visiting and licence with it.

Hogmanay is Scotland's Christmas, and it is loaded with three centuries of displaced midwinter.

The word

Nobody knows where Hogmanay comes from, and I would rather say that than pick one. The main candidates are a Norman French hoguinané or aguillanneuf, a New Year's gift; a Norse origin; and a Gaelic derivation. The French line is the most commonly favoured and it is not settled. The Gaelic term for the night is Oidhche Challainn (OY-chuh CHAL-in), the night of the Calends.

Anyone telling you confidently what Hogmanay means is going beyond the evidence.

The redding

Before any of the celebration, the work. Redding is Scots for clearing, tidying and putting to rights. The redding of the house is the thorough clean carried out before the bells, and it is not a metaphor.

The house is cleaned throughout. The ashes are taken out. The fire is cleared and reset. Debts are settled, borrowed things returned, and quarrels put right where they can be. Nothing owed, nothing borrowed, nothing dirty goes over into the new year.

There is a strong strand holding that the last of the old year's ashes should be read for a sign, and that the house should be clean before the bells or the coming year will be disordered.

I take this seriously and I would put it above every other part of the rite. The redding is the working. The saining is what you do to a cleared house; the party is what you do afterwards. Doing the smoke without doing the clean is doing the second half of something.

The saining

Covered in full in its own article, so briefly here. Water carried in silence from a dead and living ford. Drunk, then sprinkled through every room and over every person. Then juniper smoke through the house and byre, then everything thrown open to the freezing air of the new year.

With the safety caveat that article carries, because the sealed-house version of the fumigation killed a child and should never be repeated.

First-footing

The best known and the most alive.

The first foot is the first person to cross the threshold after midnight. What they bring, and what they are, sets the household's luck for the year.

Traditionally they should be:

• Male, and dark-haired. The usual explanation offered is that a fair-haired stranger meant Norse raiders, which is a tidy story and almost certainly a later rationalisation. It is at least as likely to be a simple preference for the unfamiliar-but-known.
• Not already in the house. The first foot comes in from outside. Someone who was inside at midnight cannot do it.

And they should bring:

Look at that list against the hearth article and the iron and salt article. Fire, preservation, food, warmth, money. It is a complete statement of what a household needs, carried physically across the threshold at the moment the year turns.

The traditional greeting is a wish for a good New Year, and the door should be opened to let the old year out before the new one is let in. In some accounts the back door is opened at midnight and the front door after.

The rest of it

• Auld Lang Syne, Burns's reworking of an older Scots song, sung with arms crossed and hands joined only at the last verse. The crossing at the start is a common error and worth knowing about if you care.
• The Loony Dook, a New Year's Day dip in the Firth of Forth or any other scottish loch or body of water, all equally cold. Modern, from 1986, and none the worse for it.
• The Burning of the Clavie at Burghead in Moray, on 11 January, which is Old New Year: the date the calendar change of 1752 stranded eleven days behind. A barrel of tar is set alight and carried round the town.
• Up Helly Aa in Shetland, in January, which is a Victorian invention on a Norse theme and one of the most spectacular fire festivals in Europe.
• Stonehaven's fireball swinging, on Hogmanay itself. Fire runs through all of it, which is what you would expect of a midwinter festival in a country at this latitude.

Doing it

The order matters, and it is the order the tradition uses.

• One. Redd the house. Properly. Clean it, clear the ashes, take out the rubbish, wash what needs washing.
• Two. Settle what is owed. Money, borrowed things, letters unanswered, an apology you have been avoiding. This is the part everybody skips and the part that actually changes how the new year feels.
• Three. Sain it. Water, then smoke, then open everything. Ventilated, safely, per that article.
• Four. Open the back door at midnight to let the old year out.
• Five. Let the first foot in the front, with fuel, salt, bread and a bottle.
• Six. Feed people. The rite ends at a table with other people at it, which is how nearly everything in Scottish practice ends.

And if you want the Scottish quarter-day frame around it, the reckoning-up belongs at Martinmas in November, so the debts are already settled before you get here. Hogmanay is then the clean house and the open door, not the audit.

Sources

• Banks, M. M. (1937–1941). British Calendar Customs: Scotland, 3 vols. Folklore Society. The fullest collection of Scottish calendar custom by date, and the primary source for most of this.
• Bennett, M. (1992). Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave. Polygon. Built on field recordings and first-hand accounts.
• Hutton, R. (1996). The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press. Essential on the suppression of Christmas and its consequences.
• Act for abolishing the Yule vacance — Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1640. Searchable and free.
• Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, for Oidhche Challainn and the New Year saining. See the standing caveat in How to Read an Esoteric Claim.
• Campbell, J. G. (1900). Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive.
• Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
• Dictionaries of the Scots Language for redd, reddin, first-fit, Hogmanay, and the inconclusive etymology.
• Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches — recorded accounts of first-footing, the redding and Hogmanay custom from tradition bearers.
• Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 for the 1752 calendar change and the Old New Year observances that survive because of it.

Related: [Saining]; [The Quarter Days]; [The Hearth]; [Iron, Salt and the Threshold]; [Burning to Break]